Closing his mind to the weight of the heavy leg irons, he tested the extent of his freedom, moving around the cluttered barn, studying the selection of tools available. All were rusted. Most were broken, but useful enough for his purposes. The woman was a fool. Perhaps he’d been a bigger fool not to have tied her up with her own rope, dug the key from her pocket and escaped.
Choosing a short length of baling wire, he set to work sharpening it to a fine point on the grindstone. The locks were ancient. Two twists of the sharpened wire and the first popped open, and then the second. He removed the hinged iron bands from his ankles and examined the raw and bleeding flesh. She had offered to let him ride on the back of the cart. Proudly, he had refused, but pride would be poor comfort if his feet rotted and fell off.
When he heard the cabin door open and close, he moved swiftly. By the time the woman appeared, he was back in irons, sitting meekly on a pile of straw. At least it was clean straw. Dusty, but with the sweet smell of the meadow, not like the straw pallet in his jail cell that had reeked of things he’d rather not think about.
“I brought you something to eat and a blanket.” Her voice sounded more hesitant now that she’d left her rifle behind. From the open doorway she eyed him warily before kneeling to place a thin woolen blanket and a plate of cornbread glistening with drippings just inside the door. “And here’s a bucket of water.” She reached behind her and swung the rusted pail inside. “You can drink your fill and wash with what’s left. Tomorrow I’ll take you down to the creek and you can scrub.”
She’d forgotten to mime and speak in those insultingly loud, single-syllable words. Not that she didn’t still treat him as if he were of somewhat lesser intelligence than that miserable mule of hers. Which, he thought with bitter amusement, was probably true.
Without moving, he continued to stare back at her through the fast fading light. She was small for a woman, lacking the soft layer of flesh most women kept even in the starving times. Under the shapeless garment that hung from her shoulders, she appeared more child than woman. Either way, it made little difference, as both were capable of inflicting cruelty on anyone they perceived as being different.
The smell of fresh cornbread and bacon drippings knotted his gut painfully. His belly hadn’t been filled since he’d been taken from his own land, but he’d be damned before he would shame himself by crawling in the dirt and falling on her bread like a starving animal.
“Well.” She hesitated, as if reluctant to leave. He wanted to shout, Go, woman! Leave me one small shred of dignity! “We’ll start pulling stumps come morning. I’ll bring you more food and show you where the creek is so you can bathe first. Um…the blanket. I know it’s hot now, but it gets cool just before morning.”
He made a sound in his throat that was something between a curse and a growl. It served the purpose. The woman fled, and he felt like laughing. Only, he felt more like weeping.
She had not brought him a cup. He scooped water from the bucket with his hands, then gave up and drank directly from the pail and poured the rest over his head. The bread was good, almost as good as that he remembered from his youth.
His youth…
Lying back on the bed of straw, his belly uncomfortably full, Jonah Longshadow stared up at the hayloft overhead and wondered at the curious pathways that had led him so far from his lodge on the banks of the Red River. He had come into this world a part of two distinct cultures, unwanted by his father, a white soldier who had raped his Kiowa mother. As a child he had often been taunted by other children for his white blood. As a youth he’d been watched by his elders. He had felt compelled to prove himself by counting coup on the enemies of his mother’s people. Increasingly bold, he had cheated death many times, for as a warrior, he was fearless, having little to lose.
But as a horse gatherer, he excelled most of all. By the age of eighteen, he was spending most of his time raiding the wild herds that roamed the area. Four years later, in the spring of 1875, he had just returned to his lodge after a week spent stalking a notorious ridge runner, a magnificent stallion that kept watch over his mares from the high ground. That night soldiers from Fort Sill had swept through, rounding up every warrior in the territory. Jonah, whose name had not been Jonah then, had been taken along with more than seventy others.
Pride had kept him from pleading his case, for as a warrior, he had worn the red cloth sash of the tribe’s elite Koitsenga—the Society of the Ten Bravest. Along with the other men, he had been put in chains and dispatched to Fort Sill. There, they had been placed in an unfinished icehouse and thrown chunks of raw meat once a day until they were eventually transported by way of wagon and railroad to Saint Augustine in Florida. Expecting to be executed once he reached his destination, Longshadow had instead been sentenced to indefinite imprisonment. The difference had seemed slight at the time, but that was before he met Lieutenant Richard Henry Pratt.
Pratt was like no other white soldier in Longshadow’s experience. The man had fought against the Kiowa, yet he bore no malice, choosing to educate his prisoners rather than punish them for defending their homeland. He’d had the prisoners construct their own barracks, then moved them out of Fort Marion’s dungeons. Putting them to work as bakers, sailors, fishermen and field laborers, he had even allowed them to keep their small wages. During the time when they were working on their barracks, he’d enlisted the help of a few white women to teach them to read, write and speak English.
Warily at first, but with increasing eagerness, Longshadow had allowed himself to be taught. Somewhat to his astonishment he’d discovered that he was a fair scholar, partly because of an insatiable curiosity, and partly because he had recognized education as a powerful tool. With the world around him changing so rapidly, a man needed all the knowledge he could absorb in order to survive.
After three years, Lieutenant Pratt had persuaded his superiors that the prisoners were firmly reconciled to the white man’s way. They had been granted their freedom. Most had returned to the reservation, but a few of the once-fierce warriors had elected to stay in the East.
Longshadow had been among those who elected to stay. His mother was dead. If he went back, he’d be expected to live on the reservation with its invisible borders. The Kiowa way of life was finished. From his tutors he had learned about the Jesus Road and the Plow Road. The first he hadn’t understood; the second held no appeal. Instead, he had chosen the sea. Over the next few years he had saved the money he earned as a seaman, recognizing the power of the white man’s gold, for even then a dream had been growing inside him. A dream of one day breeding fine horses. But it would take more gold than he possessed, which meant more years of work until he could save up enough to buy breeding stock and the land on which to keep them.
As a prisoner he had sailed for a company that traded in the West Indies. Upon receiving his full pardon, he had returned to the sea, for of all the options, that one was most acceptable. Life at sea reminded him of the past, when his world had been wild, free and vast. And although he read, wrote and spoke English, he kept that knowledge to himself, having quickly discovered that most of his crewmates resented an Indian who spoke their language more precisely than they did. Although he liked Pratt, and would trust the man with his life—had done as much—he found it hard to trust other whites.
So after promising to return the favor by helping some white person in need, he arranged with Pratt to collect his pay directly from the ship owner and deposit it into an account in Longshadow’s name. Each time he returned to port, Pratt gave him an accounting, congratulating him on his good sense. While other members of the crew drank and gambled away their pay almost as quickly as they earned it, Jonah watched his savings grow. He studied the written account from the bank, visualizing the horses he would one day buy—a good stallion and two, possibly three sturdy mares.
For four years he had carried the dream, as one after another, three ships had foundered in the fierce storms called hurricanes and gone down. Each time, Longshadow, along with at least a part of the crew, had